Climate Action

Climate change can have a dramatic, negative effect on food security, water security, and livelihoods, leaving the world’s poorest at risk — particularly women and children. The disruptions resulting from cyclical droughts and floods directly impact food production, changes in purchasing power, market flows, and community health. Changes in average temperatures, rainfall, and climate extremes threaten to negatively affect crop production and livestock health.

Smallholder farmers and pastoralists in developing countries are especially vulnerable as their traditional knowledge and production systems struggle to keep pace with rapidly changing climatic threats. These agriculture-based livelihood systems, which are already under pressure to provide adequate food for hundreds of millions worldwide, face immediate risk of increased crop failure, new patterns of pest infestation, loss of biodiversity, and limited availability of seeds and planting materials adapted for new climate conditions. Their livestock productivity and mortality risk has increased due to inadequate access to water and reduced pasture and rangeland that supports grazing and healthy herds. These stressors make understanding and implementing environmentally friendly and nutritionally targeted agriculture practices even more important than ever before.

For pastoralists, who move their herds in search of fresh pasture and water, climate change has upended normal pasture growth patterns and led to substantially increased costs of traditional scouting for pasture and supplemental feed when no pasture can be found. Global Communities, then working as PCI, developed the AfriScout app to connect pastoralists with current information on water and vegetation conditions using localized community grazing maps, demonstrating how technology can help respond to climate change-related challenges. This mobile application uses the power of satellite and mobile technology to provide direct support to pastoralists seeking pasture and water for the animals they rely on to survive.

Global Communities integrates climate-smart technologies and practices across our programming, including:

• Conservation agriculture
• Introduction of climate-adapted crops
• Poduction of nutritionally dense vegetables and fruits
• Integrated pest management
• Improved crop storage systems
• Improved production of poultry, goats, and sheep as well as livestock grazing systems
• Support for local animal healthcare providers
• Rainwater harvesting and small-scale irrigation structures
• Regeneration of damaged watersheds through productive agroforestry approaches.

Learn more about our Agriculture and Food Security work here.